Leftovers

• LabX Media Group ☛ Jane Goodall, Renowned Primatologist and Conservationist, Dies at 91

  Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Making things obvious

  Anyway, I mentioned I had a guestbook, and a link to it has been sitting at the bottom of every post ever since. It’s also linked at the bottom of every post if you read this site using RSS. And I mentioned it in passing every once in a while inside my posts. And yet, I still often get messages from people telling me they didn’t know this site has a guestbook. Which is totally fine, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to spend their days on my site, but it makes me wonder how many other things I assume are obvious to everyone who visits this site but actually aren’t.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Site walkthrough 1

  As someone who considers himself a gamer, there are always those parts and secrets of a game that even after having played it more than once, you simply miss! Secret passageways, hidden levels, easter eggs and whatever else. Missing optional items or skipping whole sections of a game when you play it for the first time is not only common, but expected in some cases!

  So, maybe you’ve been following me for a while and you like the blogposts, my thoughts or even me as a person. But are you aware of all the rest?

• Doc Searls ☛ Why I am Here Instead of on Substack

  Blogging is just publishing, plus whatever grows naturally around that. It’s a how, not a where, which makes it a much better what. And that what isn’t “a social media app.”

  Anyway, my thinking isn’t complete on this, and may never be. But what Hamish wrote in that newsletter turned me off to ever blogging on Substack. I like my freedom and independence.

• EFF ☛ Gate Crashing: An Interview Series

  In EFF's interview series, Gate Crashing, we talk to people who have used the internet to take nontraditional paths to the very traditional worlds of journalism, creativity, and criticism. We hope it's both inspiring to see these people and enlightening for anyone trying to find voices they like online.

  Our mini-series will be [publishing] an episode each month closing out 2025 in style.

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ A Lifelong Journey of Growth

  In a world where everything seems to be speeding up, there’s something to be said for the slower pace of, say, 20 to 30 years ago. It’s something I was thinking about recently, and a few examples came to mind.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ New site, kinda

  So what has changed? A lot, especially under the hood. For example: I have rewritten the entire CSS, and I’m no longer using SASS since it’s no longer needed; interviews are now separate from regular content at the backend level and have their own dedicate URL structure (old URLs should still work, though); the site is now better structured to be expanded into something more akin to a digital garden than “just” a blog.

• Chromium

  • Brave Browser ☛ Brave browser passes 100 million monthly active users

    As of September 30th, the Brave browser has surpassed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) worldwide across desktop and mobile, officially reaching 101 million users.

    We’d like to take a moment to celebrate this achievement, and tease what’s next. We’d also like to thank the 100 million (and counting!) people—whoever they are—who’ve joined Brave’s mission of building a privacy-by-default, user-first Web. We’re grateful for the support of all our users and particularly our vibrant Brave and BAT communities, whose passion and advocacy continue to drive us forward.

    “100 million users represent more than a growth milestone—they constitute a movement for a better Web that puts users first. Across the globe, users are choosing privacy and control over their online experience, instead of Big Tech’s tracking and abuse,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave. “Every product we’ve launched since our browser—our search engine, our premium products, our ad platform—has been built with privacy protections. As we expand our AI offerings, we will continue to design for privacy-by-default, which will fuel our next wave of growth.”

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Tiny ocean robot captures first-ever data inside Category 5 hurricane

    A robot no bigger than a surfboard has done what no machine has ever done before.

    On September 28, a small, wind-powered ocean robot became the first uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) to capture and transmit data from inside a Category 5 hurricane.

  • Fabian Beuke ☛ Coq Tutorial

    Coq is a proof management system that provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms, and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs. This tutorial will guide you through the process of installing Coq on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and then how to write a simple proof using coqtop. coqtop is the Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) for Coq. It allows you to interactively develop proofs. If you come from Haskell, you can think of Coq like GHC and coqtop like GHCi.

  • Samuel Jaques ☛ Quantum Landscape

    Quantum computers have a lot of potential, but how far are we from that potential? When will all of our RSA keys be obsolete? When will -- as Microsoft hopes – quantum computers solve climate change?

    I drew a quick sketch of my impressions of the field on Twitter, and Steve Weis asked for a more detailed treatment. Here is a more accurate picture of that sketch: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Sara Jakša ☛ IndieWeb Book Club October 2025: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

    When I saw that IndieWeb is also finally starting a book club, I was excited. I remember we mentioned it a time or two in the past, so I am glad that Zachary took the plunge and started that one.

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Compsci Grads Are Cooked

    And the numbers are even worse for young people with degrees in computer science, who have an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent — and also for computer engineering grads, 7.5 percent; by comparison, their peers who majored in art history currently have an unemployment rate of around 3 percent.

• Hardware

  • 404 Media ☛ Kodak Is Selling Its Own Film Again for the First Time in a Decade

    Kodak announced two new types of film that it will sell directly to photography stores, sidestepping a bizarre distribution agreement that has been in place since its bankruptcy.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ $5–$10 price increases for some 4GB and 8GB products

    As many of you are aware, memory prices have been rising rapidly for the last six months. Insatiable demand for High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI applications is competing for fab space with the commodity LPDDR memory used by Raspberry Pi, leading to shortages and price rises. At this point, memory costs roughly 120% more than it did a year ago.

  • The Register UK ☛ Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

    Raspberry Pi is upping the cost of some devices by double-digit percentages from today driven by what CEO Eben Upton calls "insatiable demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI applications."

    Even though the company entered the year with substantial stockpiles of memory, Upton said the time had come "to pass some of this cost on."

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Study identifies key agricultural practices that threaten soil health and global food supply

    Soil resilience is the ability of soils to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disturbances, ranging from everyday management practices to more severe shocks such as extreme weather events. A major review of agricultural practices has concluded that while intensive techniques such as plowing, fertilizer use and irrigation boost crop yields in the short term, their regular longer-term use can degrade soils, leaving them less able to withstand shocks such as drought, flooding or geopolitical disruption.

• Proprietary

  • CRN ☛ Google Cloud Layoffs Hit Employees As Sales Reach Record Highs [Ed: The claims about the sales might be false, misleading, fraud]

    Google has reportedly laid off Google Cloud employees as the tech giant’s cloud business unit continues to shatter sales and operating income records quarter after quarter.

    Google Cloud employee layoffs have affected workers in user experience roles, such as employees tasked with working on design and user experience (UX) research, according to a report by Business Insider and several LinkedIn posts seen by CRN.

    “After nearly a decade working my dream job at Google, my role was impacted by a recent organizational change,” said a Google senior user experience researcher who posted on LinkedIn. “While it’s an unexpected transition, I’m incredibly grateful for the experience.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft slaps Game Pass Ultimate with a 50% price hike — PC Game Pass is now almost 38% more expensive, with hardly any new benefits

  • The Register UK ☛ 50K Cisco firewalls remain vulnerable to advanced attacks

    The internet monitoring outfit said that as of Monday, the internet-facing Cisco firewalls are potentially exploitable, with the vast majority of those – more than 19,000 – located in the US.

  • Allen Pike ☛ UX Entropy

    Success at scale always causes problems. Enterprise software success, doubly so.

    The first hurdle for Zoom, shortly after their IPO, was security issues. These ranged from underpowered encryption to leaky analytics to the revelation that their legendary one-click meeting flow was itself a security vulnerability. With market dominance in hand and billions of dollars of enterprise revenue on the line, Zoom started to unwind their approach of usability at all costs. Zoom founder Eric Yuan on this shift: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ AI has had zero effect on jobs so far: Yale study

      The Yale researchers' nothingburger result has precedent. In 2023, a study by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that generative AI would probably not replace most workers.

      A study of Danish workers published in April determined that generative AI had no material impact on wages or jobs. Another such study published in February found "overall employment effects are modest, as reduced demand in exposed occupations is offset by productivity-driven increases in labor demand at AI-adopting firms."

    • Tim Bray ☛ GenAI Predictions

      I’m going to take a big chance here and make predictions about GenAI’s future. Yeah, I know, you’re feeling overloaded on this stuff and me too, but it seems to have sucked the air out of all the other conversations. I would so like to return to arguing about Functional Programming or Free Trade. This is risky and there’s a pretty good chance that I’m completely wrong. But I’ll try to entertain while prognosticating.

    • Dan Q ☛ The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

      I agree that, based on the ways in which AI is being used, financed, and marketed… we’re absolutely in an unsustainable bubble. There’s a lot of fishy accounting, dubious business models, and overpromised marketing. I’m not saying AI’s useless: it’s not! But it’s yet proven itself to be revolutionary, nor even on the path to being so, and it’s so expensive that it seems unlikely that the current “first dose is free” business model is almost-certainly unsustainable.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft’s Office 365 workslop generator — for ‘vibe working’

      This is a gadget for faking evidence. You ask for a document, a spreadsheet, or a PowerPoint to back up any garbage claim you want to make. Copilot will go out and generate completely fake work-spam for you!

      Microsoft says you should “work iteratively” to perfect the slop. But you know about 0% of vibe workers will bother, any more than they bother checking now.

    • EFF ☛ Wave of Phony News Quotes Affects Everyone—Including EFF

      Whether due to generative AI hallucinations or human sloppiness, the internet is increasingly rife with bogus news content—and you can count EFF among the victims.

    • Data & Society ☛ Scam GPT

      Scams are not a new phenomenon. But generative AI is making scamming even easier, faster, and more accessible, fueling a surge in scams and misinformation at a global scale. This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and more likely to either perpetuate scams or fall victim to them.

      AI-enhanced scams are not merely financial or technological crimes; they also exploit social vulnerabilities — whether short-term, like travel, or structural, like precarious employment. This means they require social solutions in addition to technical ones. By examining how scammers are changing and accelerating their methods, we hope to show that defending against them will require a constellation of cultural shifts, corporate interventions, and eff­ective legislation.

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ ICYMI: Farmer's Insurance Data Breach Impacts Over One Million Individuals

      Wired and Business Insider have removed news features written by a freelance journalist after concerns they are likely AI-generated works of fiction, according to an article from the Press Gazette in the UK. Freedom of expression non-profit Index on Censorship is also in the process of taking down a magazine article by the same author after concerns were raised by the Press Gazette. The publisher has concluded that it “appears to have been written by AI”. Several other UK and US online publications have published questionable articles by the same person, going by the name of Margaux Blanchard, since April. Most of the published stories contained case studies of named people whose details the Press Gazette was unable to verify online, casting doubt on whether any of the quotes or facts contained in the articles are real.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study

      Yale researchers say that despite the anxiety about AI taking people's jobs, there's very little evidence of it actually happening.

      Economists with Yale's Budget Lab, a non-partisan policy research group, took a look at how US employment has changed since the November 2022 debut of ChatGPT and the sequent release of other generative AI models.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Minor Ends Life Over Phone Use

      A 12-year-old boy died by suicide in Venkatapuram, Yemmiganur, on Monday after being admonished by his parents for excessive use of a mobile phone.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Air Force admits SharePoint privacy issue; reports of breach

      "This message is to inform you of a critical Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) exposure related to USAF SharePoint Permissions," the notice says. "As a result of this breach, all USAF SharePoints will be blocked Air Force-wide to protect sensitive information."

      Two other Microsoft services, Teams and Power BI dashboards, will also allegedly be blocked because both access SharePoint, the alert continued, adding that restoration may take up to two weeks.

    • Dark Reading ☛ End-of-Life Systems Haunt Enterprise Security Networks

      Windows 10 reaches end-of-life on Oct. 14, which will triple the number of vulnerable enterprise systems and create a massive attack surface for cybercriminals.

    • Futurism ☛ Professor Warns Society Is Veering Toward a Digital Apocalypse

      As Curran puts it: “there are good reasons to believe that little will be done about these risks until a massive society-wide crisis emerges.”

      How exactly the digital apocalypse plays out is difficult to say. It could look like a “widespread breakdown of basic infrastructure, such as electricity or telecommunications due to a cyberattack, to an attack that modifies existing infrastructure to make it dangerous,” Curran writes.

    • Security Week ☛ Chinese APT 'Phantom Taurus' Targeting Organizations With Net-Star Malware

      In 2025, the group started using Net-Star, a .NET malware suite targeting IIS web servers, which consists of three web-based backdoors: IIServerCore (a fileless backdoor) and two AssemblyExecuter variants (.NET malware loaders).

    • The Register UK ☛ Schools are studying cybersecurity yet still flunk recovery

      Teacher training in the art of cybersecurity jumped from 61 percent during the 2023 to 2024 school year to 72 percent in 2024 to 2025. Despite this progress, recovery times have worsened significantly.

    • The Register UK ☛ Air Force admits SharePoint privacy issue as reports trickle out of possible breach

      The US Air Force confirmed it's investigating a "privacy-related issue" amid reports of a Microsoft SharePoint-related breach and subsequent service-wide shutdown, rendering mission files and other critical tools potentially unavailable to service members.

      "The Department of the Air Force is aware of a privacy-related issue," an Air Force spokesperson told The Register on Wednesday, while declining to answer specific questions about the alleged digital intrusion.

• Linux Foundation

  • PR Newswire ☛ Linux Foundation Announces Contribution of Newton by Disney Research, Google DeepMind and NVIDIA to Accelerate Open Robot Learning

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today welcomed Newton, an open source, GPU-accelerated, extensible physics engine that enables faster, more scalable simulations to lower the barrier to robotics research. Co-developed by Disney Research, Google DeepMind, and NVIDIA, Newton was designed and built by and for robotics developers to tackle the modern-day challenges of building generalist robots.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Papers Please ☛ ICE is buying location data from smartphone apps, etc.

      How can your movements be tracked?

      The Penlink surveillance company counts some of the ways:

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Is cookie consent going to change in the UK?

      Open Rights Group convened a stakeholder roundtable on the future of adtech and cookie consent requirements in the UK following the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) consultation on a new enforcement approach toward regulating advertising.

      The ICO’s aim of unlocking “privacy-preserving alternatives to the dominant adtech business model” is positive but the risks from relaxing online tracking rules are high. If not done right, exempting cookies from consent requirements risks exposing Internet users to online harms, harmful advertising, and predatory targeting based on people’s addictions, vulnerabilities and state of anxiety.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Cookie Consent Review Exposes Weaknesses In UK Data Protection Reform

      In a previous blog, we explained the issues about cookie consent requirements and online tracking. This blog focuses on the impact that the recent Data (Use and Access) Bill is having on this important issue.

      As the first test to the UK data protection regime emerges, fears over Henry VIII powers are already materialising: key changes to the UK data protection regime are being discussed with little publicity, and despite the potential impact they may have on the privacy and safety of UK internet users. This contributes to a broader concern, characterised by ever-lower standards of public life and the ongoing attacks on the integrity of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), whose role is being hijacked by governments’ partisan agendas and the private interests of online tracking companies.

    • The Register UK ☛ Meta will listen into AI conversations to personalize ads

      Meta intends to begin using people's text exchanges and voice conversations with its AI service to generate personalized posts, reels, and other attention lures starting on December 16, 2025.

    • The Verge ☛ The UK’s war on Apple encryption is back | The Verge

      This follows the UK issuing a broader secret order in January, demanding that Apple create a backdoor for security officials to access global encrypted user files. While it’s a criminal offense to reveal the existence of these secret TCN orders, Apple responded by filing an appeal and removing a feature, Advanced Data Protection, its end-to-end encrypted iCloud storage, from the UK. After facing pressure from the US regarding potential violations of the Cloud Act, it was announced by US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Britain had rescinded the order.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ UK Again Wants iCloud Backdoor

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta will start mining Hey Hi (AI) chatbot conversations to target users with ads and content

      Meta Platforms Inc. announced today that, in an effort to improve its targeted advertising across all its platforms, it will start analyzing users’ conversations with Hey Hi (AI) chatbots. Users will receive a notification about the change on Oct. 7, while Meta’s privacy policy will be updated on Dec. 16.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Your Favourite Phone Apps Might be Leaking Your Company's Secrets

      Think about the apps on your phone right now. Your banking app, your working email, the food delivery app: each one is talking to a server somewhere - sending and receiving data through messages sent through APIs, the underlying infrastructure that allows apps to communicate.

      And here's the problem - hackers have determined that the APIs of mobile apps, when left visible and exploitable, can be a goldmine. Security outfit Zimperium has released a new report that reveals the scale of the problem: [...]

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Your private data isn't as private as you think

      It’s not widely understood that it is technically possible for privately hosted data to be obtained by government, law enforcement, or even private parties without your knowledge. Here’s how it works: [...]

    • Privacy International ☛ Big Tech’s bind with military and intelligence agencies

    • Privacy International ☛ Challenging the Militarisation of Tech

    • Privacy International ☛ The Second Order: The UK Government's new secret order still strikes at Apple's security

      Today we learned the UK has issued a new secret order forcing Apple to undermine iCloud’s advanced encryption again, but this time only for UK users.

      While this seems like progress - and it is in the sense that the UK is clearly reacting to the global concern and US Government pressure generated by its original directive to Apple - the new order may be just as big a threat to worldwide security and privacy as the old one. The status of the original order remains unclear.

    • Privacy International ☛ Toward Regulation: Addressing the Legal Void in Facial Recognition Technology

      There is an urgent need for the regulation of facial recognition technologies in the UK to protect people from the grave risk it poses to human rights. In light of this, we conducted research to see how other states and jurisdictions are regulating biometric technologies.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK's digital hospital plan meets analog reality check

      The BMA raised further questions. "We are told that there will be dedicated doctors assigned to this service," said Dr Tom Dolphin, chair of the BMA Council. "We're keen to find out where this extra staffing is going to be sourced from. Doctors are already flat out across the NHS and there is little spare capacity to go around."

    • Cyble Inc ☛ FTC Sues Sendit App, CEO Over Illegal Children's Data Collection

      According to the FTC’s complaint, Sendit—an app that integrates with Snapchat and Instagram and allows users to ask anonymous questions and play interactive games—has been downloaded more than 30 million times. Its youthful user base, the agency said, was no accident. The app allegedly positioned itself as a fun, social environment for teenagers while simultaneously tracking their activity, collecting identifiers, and using the data for targeted advertising without parental consent.

    • Court House News ☛ Publishers could get more ad data from Google, witness says

      This is the second week of a trial focused on how Google will pay for antitrust violations in the operation of its ad tech business. Throughout it, rival ad executives have complained that the tech titan lacks transparency.

      The Justice Department seeks divestiture of DFP and Google’s ad exchange, products that have turned the company into a powerhouse and rake in billions annually. Coupled with a proposed injunction that would keep Google out of the market for a decade, the potential punishment is unprecedented, according to Google’s legal team.

    • The Register UK ☛ Imgur exits the UK as parent company faces fine

      The Information Commissioner's Office's (ICO) interim executive director, Tim Capel, said on Tuesday that its findings from the investigation were provisional, and the regulator would consider any evidence presented by MediaLab before proceeding with a fine.

      Capel also hinted that even if Imgur continues to block UK users, the ICO may still seek to penalize its parent company.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Record ☛ Millions impacted by data breaches at insurance giant, auto dealership software firm

      Motility said it suffered from a ransomware attack where the hackers encrypted servers that support the company’s business operations.

      An investigation revealed that the hackers stole personal information on 766,670 people before encrypting the company’s systems. The information stolen ranges from names and addresses to Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

    • Security Week ☛ OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Allow Private Key Recovery, Code Execution, DoS Attacks

      The OpenSSL Project has announced the availability of several new versions of the open source SSL/TLS toolkit, which include patches for three vulnerabilities.

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ When a Shooter Is Trans—and Not a Cis Male—Suddenly Identity Matters

    Twenty-three-year-old Robin Westman on August 27 opened fire through the windows of a church where children were attending mass to celebrate their first week at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooter carried a rifle, pistol and shotgun, and she shot more than 100 rounds. Westman fatally shot two children, ages 8 and 10, and injured 18 more people, before dying at the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  • FAIR ☛ CPB Is Dead, But We Need Public Media More Than Ever

    Federal funding for public broadcasting officially ends today, the beginning of the new federal fiscal year. With the Republican-directed rescission of already-allocated funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Project 2025 dream of pulling the plug on PBS and NPR has been realized. As a percentage of GDP, the United States already spent dramatically less on public media than nearly every other democracy; now it joins the authoritarian and hybrid regimes that keep a tighter grip on media content.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Criminal Enterprise Masquerading as a Political Party

    The Republican Party has become a seditious conspiracy against constitutional governance, orchestrated by corrupt oligarchs, seditious Christian nationalists, and fascist neo-reactionaries from Silicon Valley. These actors are exploiting legitimate anti-elite sentiment among Americans who have real grievances about economic inequality and institutional failure. They use well-funded propaganda and algorithmic manipulation to trick citizens into supporting the very oligarchs who created those problems in the first place. The goal isn’t reform but permanent power and the end of competitive elections altogether.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Leave the Military Now

    I am not going to try to convince generals in the United States armed forces to embrace my own personal moral beliefs. Rather, I would urge them all to consider their own moral beliefs. Honor and courage are often touted as the highest military values. What do those values demand of these generals at this moment in history? To salute their deranged superiors, and then, in private, to mutter under their breath about how incompetent and awful those commanders are? Is it honorable for these hundreds of generals to go forward doing their very best to carry out the will of a president who vows openly to use the military to suppress his domestic political enemies, and who has in fact already done that in major cities? Is it courageous of these officer to—for the sake of their own careers—continue to robotically serve a man who is obviously making decisions based upon things that are not true, and who is obsessed with revenge above all, and who is quite straightforward about his intentions to use the military to forcefully oppress Americans? Is that what honor and courage demand of the highest ranking officers in our military? Nothing at all?

  • Privacy International ☛ Challenging the Militarisation of Tech

    Governments and companies around the world are fighting to establish their dominance - plunging us into a ‘tech race’ that is redefining the battlefield and blurring the line between civilian and military infrastructures. This dramatic shift is affecting everything around us, reshaping our future, and radically changing the priorities of politics and investment.

    We are being pushed into a militarised future we don’t want.

    This phenomena is visible in many forms: [...]

  • Privacy International ☛ Big Tech’s bind with military and intelligence agencies

    Society is seeing a sea change in industry’s capacities to exploit data. And they’re building it for governments too. Unless something changes soon, we will find governments everywhere capable of vast unfettered surveillance capacities, all because investors thought it would be clever to build server farms and AI tools.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • 404 Media ☛ 404 Media and Freedom of the Press Foundation Sue DHS

    Both Freedom of the Press Foundation and 404 Media filed similar Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with DHS and CMS seeking a copy of the agreement. Neither agency provided the requested records in time, so we have now filed the lawsuit. In 404 Media’s case, CMS acknowledged the request but has not provided the records, and DHS did not even acknowledge the request at all.

    404 Media’s request asked for a copy of the specific agreement, and if the agencies were unable to locate it, to alternatively provide copies of all agreements between DHS and CMS from this year.

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Whistleblowers Say NASA Is Poised to Kill an Astronaut

    NASA whistleblowers claim that President Donald Trump’s drastic changes to the space agency are imperiling safety to such a degree that insiders have become “very concerned that we’re going to see an astronaut death within a few years.”

    That’s according to a blockbuster report from the US Senate.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Ted Cruz: "Let's stop attacking pedophiles"

    If one is tempted to presume he meant to say "Let's stop pedophiles," it's also true that one of the most overwhelming topics in U.S. politics now is Cruz and other Republicans' efforts to prevent the release of the Epstein Files. President Trump was a close friend of the billionaire pedophile and ongoing work to conceal records of Epstein's criminal activities and clients surely weighs on Cruz's mind as much as the President's.

• Environment

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Why Is This Remote and Rugged River in Alaska Turning Orange?

    The Salmon River had become what’s known as a “rusting river,” a phenomenon caused by the presence of high amounts of iron and other metals. Sullivan, Dial and their colleagues returned to the waterway to take samples in 2022 and 2023. Based on their analyses, they suspect it has fallen victim to sulfide mineral weathering, also known as acid-rock drainage, which can occur when permafrost thaws.

  • RFERL ☛ IAEA Urges Restoration Of Power Line At Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant After Zelenskyy Sounds Alarm

    Zelenskyy said it was “a threat to everyone,” and no terrorist “has ever dared to do to a nuclear plant what Russia is doing.”

    Grossi said he was "in constant contact with the two sides with the aim to enable the plant’s swift reconnection to the electricity grid."

  • Meduza ☛ Ukraine warns of ‘critical’ situation as Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant left without external power for a week

    “The generators and the plant were not designed for this, have never operated in this mode for long, and we already have information that one generator has failed,” Zelensky wrote. He stressed that “the situation is critical” and that “it is the Russians, through their shelling, who are preventing repairs to the power lines to the plant.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Save This Species: Chimpanzees

    • Vox ☛ Jane Goodall dies: Chimpanzee expert and environmental advocate’s final message

      Goodall, who revolutionized what we know about chimpanzees and animal intelligence, was interviewed as recently as last week, during New York City Climate Week. And her message was clear, consistent, and timely.

      “It seems these days everybody is so involved with technology that we forget that we’re not only part of the natural world, we’re an animal like all the others,” Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, a conservation group, said last week during the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit in NYC. “We’re an animal like all the others. But we depend on it for clean air, water, food, clothing — everything.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ethics Reform Legislation Failed to Pass Several Statehouses in 2025

    In Virginia this year, a legislative committee killed a bill that would have required lawmakers to disclose any crypto holdings. In New Mexico, the Democratic governor vetoed legislation that would have required lobbyists to be more transparent about what bills they were trying to kill or pass. And in North Dakota, where voters who were galvanized by a group called BadAss Grandmas for Democracy established a state ethics commission nearly seven years ago, lawmakers continued a pattern of limiting the panel’s power.

    At a time when the bounds of government ethics are being stretched in Washington, D.C., hundreds of ethics-related bills were introduced this year in state legislatures, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures’ ethics legislation database. While legislation strengthening ethics oversight did pass in some places, a ProPublica analysis found lawmakers across multiple states targeted or thwarted reforms designed to keep the public and elected officials accountable to the people they serve.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Companies Sought Connections to Border Czar Tom Homan

    The first time a Pennsylvania consultant named Charles Sowell connected with border czar Tom Homan was when Sowell reached out on LinkedIn in 2021, looking for advice about border contracting work. Homan had finished a stint as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, capping a three-decade career in federal government. He and Sowell built a rapport, based partly on their shared criticisms of then-President Joe Biden’s border policies.

    By 2023, the men had gone into business together. Sowell was paying Homan as a consultant to his boutique firm, SE&M Solutions, which advised companies — in some cases for a fee of $20,000 a month — seeking contracts from the agencies where Homan had once worked. In 2024, Sowell became chair of the board of Homan’s foundation, Border911, which championed tougher border security.

  • The Register UK ☛ Nadella creates Microsoft Commercial CEO, will plan future

    Althoff left Oracle nearly 13 years ago to join Microsoft as its executive VP and chief commercial officer. He set up the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) division to handle enterprise and partner sales, which Nadella called the company's "most important growth engine."

  • RIPE ☛ Announcing the First RIPE Code of Conduct Survey

    Help shape a safer, more open RIPE community. We’re launching our first Code of Conduct survey to understand how safe people feel at RIPE meetings and how likely they are to report concerns. If you have a moment to answer five quick, anonymous questions - your input will shape what we improve next.

  • Linuxiac ☛ NixOS Moderation Team Resigns in Protest of SC Interference

    In a public statement, the moderators said the SC attempted to override their decisions, effectively undermining the independence of moderation.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Draganfly Wins U.S. Army Contract to Build FPV Drones Overseas

    But here’s where it gets interesting: instead of just shipping boxes of drones from factories back home, Draganfly will help establish on-site manufacturing facilities at overseas U.S. Forces locations. That’s right — the Army wants to build drones closer to where they’ll actually be used.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Is Trump The Kind of Guy Who Eats Last?

    Officers eat last. It’s both a very simple idea and a powerful model of leadership. The concept is called “servant leadership,” the notion that being in charge is about humility, responsibility to others, and working together to fulfill a mission, not bossing people around or having underlings serve you. It’s influenced how I think about being the head of an organization.

  • The Register UK ☛ California pols pretend to regulate AI, create paperwork

    Newsom signed California Senate Bill 53, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, into law on Monday. The law largely does what it says on the tin, placing a number of transparency requirements on the frontier developers. Large AI firms, defined by the bill as those with annual gross revenue in excess of $500 million, including affiliates, must publish and update frontier AI frameworks, include added disclosures in their transparency reports, report critical safety incidents to the state Office of Emergency Services, and not retaliate against whistleblowers, among other requirements.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta reportedly acquires startup Rivos to accelerate work on its in-house AI chips

    Rivos, based in Santa Clara, California, is said to be focused on designing chips based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, which is an alternative to Intel Corp.’s and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s x86 architecture.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Charging $100,000 for H-1B visas will cost the U.S. uncountable wealth

    H-1B immigration is like a natural selection process that benefits the U.S. immensely. Highly skilled immigrants in areas such as technology and medicine come hungry for hard work and full of ideas to better the world — to create new products, services and even markets as well as to cater to existing needs through more incremental improvement and optimization. Many of our best students are immigrants who are looking to stay in the United States and create work opportunities that would not be possible anywhere else in the world. In the United States, we recognize entrepreneurial success perhaps more than any other country. It is one of our greatest attributes as a society.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Verge ☛ Trump admin adds banner attacking ‘Radical Left Democrats’ to government websites

      Not all federal agencies display these kinds of messages, as websites for the Department of State, the Department of Education, and the Federal Communications Commission have a banner that simply states that the sites will not be updated due to the government shutdown.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Many book bans could be judging titles mainly by their covers

    During the 2020s, book banning has become a viral phenomenon. Small, conservative [sic] nonprofits such as Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, have developed and expanded their advocacy for book bans at the local, state and national levels. These groups position themselves as defenders of parental rights against obscenity in education, while interpreting "obscenity" broadly enough to include so-called "woke" ideologies.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Against Campus ‘Debate’

    That politicians, lawyers, and journalists are not especially familiar with or prefer to ignore the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech is regrettable, but not surprising given their incentives and the many other obstacles to tracking important distinctions in complex societies. Somewhat oddly during the past decade (or so) universities are incredibly recalcitrant to inform outsiders and members of their own communities about the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech. In many places it should, thus, not surprise that the law barely recognizes a difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech. Even most of the great recent declarations on institutional neutrality by elite universities find it difficult to articulate a principled distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech.

  • BIA Net ☛ Amedspor fined over Kurdish-language chest sponsor tagline

    Amedspor, a football club based in the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, has been fined by the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) for displaying a Kurdish-language message on its team jersey despite prior approval from the federation.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Inside Russia’s Musical Underground

    Street concerts and underground gatherings offer a rare hint of hope for the many young Russians who have grown disheartened by Moscow’s prolonged war and deepening repression. Musicians have become influential activists and symbols of political resistance, just as they were in the final years of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin has repeatedly tried to suppress the music scene and punish its leaders, a sign that Putin seems to understand the danger they pose. But despite the persecutions, the underground is showing no sign of being silenced. In fact, it’s growing.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ YouTube, Disney and Meta settled. Inside Trump's $90-million payday

    The Google-owned streamer agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after his account was banned following the Jan. 6, 2021, [insurrection] at the U.S. Capitol. That brings Trump’s haul from media and tech companies to more than $90 million in the last year.

    Some of these suits deal with conflicts the president has experienced with news networks such as ABC and CBS. Others confront the fallout from the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

  • The Register UK ☛ Afghanistan goes offline after Taliban impose tele-ban

    NetBlocks and Cloudflare both observed internet traffic to Afghanistan waning on Monday, before traffic in and out of the country collapsed later that day. NetBlocks reports that telephone services are also down. Cloudflare spotted a drastic reduction in traffic from local mobile carriers.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Russia detains journalist Svetlana Khustik for ‘fake’ news about Ukraine war

    “The criminal case against Svetlana Khustik is yet more evidence that Russian authorities have no shame in imprisoning journalists for their work,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities must drop all charges against Khustik and release her immediately, along with all imprisoned journalists.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Disney’s Stupid, Pointless Ban Of Jimmy Kimmel Lost Them 1.7 Million Streaming Subscribers

    Disney and ABC, hand in hand with right wing broadcast affiliates, recently tried to appease our dim authoritarian king by putting his least favorite comedian on hiatus. The claim was that Kimmel had said something insensitive about the the killing of right wing race-baiting propagandist Charlie Kirk; the real reason is the companies are lobbying Trump to eliminate the last remaining media consolidation limits.

    Meanwhile Disney, like most major streaming companies, can’t help but descend down the rabbit hole of enshittification. With streaming growth saturating and streaming executives fresh out of any sort of innovation or new ideas, major media companies are looking to cut corners, embrace more pointless mergers, raise prices, and otherwise nickel-and-dime existing customers to goose stock valuations.

  • CPJ ☛ Son of jailed Chinese journalist Dong Yuyu says espionage conviction ‘purely political’

    Punishment of hard labor, censorship, and threats of demotion over more than three decades did not stop Chinese journalist Dong Yuyu from doing his work. It was lunch with a diplomat that finally did.

  • CPJ ☛ Hunted, raped, starved: Sudan's journalists under siege in El-Fasher

    “This was not random violence. This was punishment because of my work,” she told CPJ, on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.

    The Darfur Women Journalists Forum told CPJ it had recorded the rape of six female journalists since the start of the war, four of which occurred in El-Fasher. This is likely a vast underestimate of the true scale of the problem, given the stigma around sexual violence and lack of support available to survivors.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Breach Media ☛ Canada Post faces two futures—a revitalized public service or a billionaire cash machine

    The government intends to replace postal workers with community mailboxes, speed up deliveries through subcontracted gig labour, and quietly hand over profitable routes to private couriers.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Wounded Knee medals decision sparks outrage in Native communities

    In 1890, an estimated 250 men, women and children were killed by U.S. soldiers on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, many as they fled the violence and well after orders to cease fire. Some estimates put the number of dead over 300, more than half women and children.

    “The actions at Wounded Knee were not acts of bravery and valor deserving of the Medal of Honor,” Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairwoman Janet Alkire said. ”There is nothing Hegseth can do to rewrite the truth of that day.”

  • JURIST ☛ Russia withdraws from European Convention for the Prevention of Torture

    Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed the withdrawal of Russia from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture into law. The move effectively eliminates oversight of the country’s prisons and detention facilities at a time when Moscow faces widespread accusations of torture and inhuman treatment against its own citizens, Ukrainian civilians, and prisoners of war.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: The 4th Amendment will no longer protect you

    The practical effect of this decision is enormous. It strips away what little remained of the guardrails that prevented police (including agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) from indiscriminately seizing anyone with only a flimsy pretext.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias.

    But this experience with ChatGPT brought all that pain back. “It reaffirms who is normal or fit to write an academic cover letter,” Singha says, “by considering what is most likely or most probable.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Sylvan Esso on Why They Pulled Their Music From Spotify

    The band Sylvan Esso has removed its music from Spotify in protest of the company’s exploitative practices. In an exclusive interview with Jacobin, they explain their reasoning — and why the move feels so good even though it’s financially risky.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • 404 Media ☛ OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus

    The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Major Labels Expand Udio Lawsuit, Calling Out Alleged Scraping

    Let the amended copyright complaints continue: The major labels have updated their infringement suit against Uncharted Labs, the company behind AI music generator Udio.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Academic research finds economic, technical and operational harms from Italy’s Piracy Shield

    The paper begins with a good introduction to the general area of IP and DNS blocking, also discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), before detailing the history of Piracy Shield. As the paper notes, one of the major concerns about the system is the lack of transparency: AGCOM does not publish a list of IP addresses or domain names that are subject to its blocking. That not only makes it extremely difficult to correct mistakes, it also – conveniently – hides those mistakes, as well as the scope and impact of Piracy Shield. To get around this lack of transparency, the researchers had to resort to a dataset leaked on GitHub, which contained 10,918 IPv4 addresses and 42,664 domain names (more precisely, the latter were “fully qualified domain names” – FQDN) that had been blocked. As good academics, the researchers naturally verified the dataset as best they could: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Rightsholders Urge China to Take Action Against 'Export-Only' Piracy Services

    IIPA, which represents the movie, music, and software industries, wants China to take action against a sophisticated and growing trend of "export-only" piracy services. These pirate sites and apps are operated from China but blocked locally, presumably to evade local law enforcement. IIPA shared its concerns in a formal submission to the U.S. Trade Representative, highlighting MagisTV/FlujoTV and LokLok as prime examples.